Misfits
by AmicableAlien
Summary: Bertie Pelham has always had a soft spot for misfits, right from the beginning...
1. Misfit

**MISFIT**

* * *

 _Pelham House,_

 _London, March 1922_

* * *

"Herbert Archibald Peregrine Pelham, seventh Marquess of Hexham."

The man, perched at the edge of the ottoman lounger, scowled. "Don't talk such rot, Peter."

"Rot?" The languid laugh barely shook the blue silk coverlet. "On the contrary, dear boy. I am in deadly- some might even say _fatal_ \- earnest."

The thin hand, pale and long-fingered, lifted from the embroidered coverlet and twisted up. Even through the muted light filtering between the muslin swathes of the master bed in Pelham house, the bloodstone signet ring, carved with the Pelham crest, flashed and burned.

"It does sound rather medieval." Peter Pelham mused. "And frightfully high-handed. But I have made the decision to cast you as my heir, dear Bertie. Successor to all my largesse. A situation that I imagine," The frail hand, as though overburdened by the weight of the centuries-old ring, fell back to the coverlet. "Should come to fruition sooner rather than later."

"Nonsense." It took an effort for Bertie to put the conviction in his voice. His cousin, always the smaller, more fragile of the two of them, seemed dwarfed by the bright silks and old-fashioned fourposter bed around him. "You'll see me down, Peter. We've always known that."

"I _have_ had my share of luck." The fine dark hair flopped over the high Pelham forehead, lined with premature creases of pain. The diffidence in Peter's voice was belied by the puckish gleam in the blue eyes. His cousin, more accustomed than most to Peter's sense of dry humour, took heart from the momentary rallying. Bertie snorted as he recalled the many incidents when death seemed to nip imminently at his cousin's toes, only to be swept away at the eleventh hour by some unexpected turn of fate.

"Luck? Is that what you call it?"

Clambering to his feet, he strolled over to the window. "Was it luck that saw you stave off pneumonia after we got lost in those Roman ruins up Torr's Combe? D'you remember? We spent the whole night out on the moor with little more than our jackets on our backs in the middle of the January chill. I was in bed for weeks afterwards but you curled up by the nursery fire for no more than two hours before you were ready to head out again."

"Great-aunt Tabitha always observed I was a cold-blooded individual."

"Or that time we travelled to Wales for the Caerwent excavation. The very first day we arrived, I toppled into a bloody dig-hole and broke my ankle while you spent the next three weeks skipping around like a goat, without a care."

"Yes, but you have always had a heavy foot, Bertie. And I did warn you that the site was rather rough and ready."

"Then the three years you spent with that narcissist Lawrence, dashing around Palestine and Arabia…"

"…while you were up to your neck in mud and gore in Flanders. Where, if I recall the statistics correctly, the average life of a junior officer was little over ten weeks."

 _Six_ , Bertie thought. _Six weeks. And some didn't even make it that long._

Aloud, he continued his argument as though Peter had not spoken. "Shooting Bedouin or whatever it was you were doing. I can't count the number of times Mother wrote to me with some complaint about your adventures."

"Shooting _with_ the Bedouin. The distinction is, I think, a little important."

"With, at, around-"

"Around?"

"Suffice to say, old lad, you've seen off more than enough trouble in your life to stick your spoon in the wall just now."

"How heartening you are, dear boy." Peter murmured, his head leaning back against the mound of pillows that propped up his frail chest and eased the husky breathing. "A dose of liver salts, chicken broth and cod liver oil all wrapped up in one bracing personality."

"How anything can be bloody bracing in this stuffy room, I can't think." For want of something, _anything_ to break the gloom of finality hanging about his cousin's sick room, Bertie wrenched back the curtains. "Look, fine bright morning. All of London at your feet, and if you can bring yourself to buck up and pack, Peter, there's the twelve-twenty northbound leaving St Pancras for York that we can grab. We should be in Brancaster-"

He turned back to the sumptuous bedroom and stopped.

The break in his cousin's diatribe was enough for Peter Pelham to summon the energy and lift one eyelid. A strange smile played a rictus dance on his sunken face. "Ah, yes. Rather worse in the light of day, old chap."

"Good… God, Peter."

The sixth Marquess of Hexham drew in a rattle of breath. His skin, pale in the dim light of the bedroom lamps, was translucent against the white winter sunshine. His had always been a plump face, square and strong-jawed like all the Pelham clan. Now, cheekbones appeared in the shrunken planes of his face, scored with deep lines of pain like the vicious slash of a cat's claws. The Oriental blanket, a souvenir from Peter's time with General Allenby in Cairo, lay heavily across his shoulders. The bright scarlet and poppy embroidery served only to accentuate the black punches of exhaustion under Peter's eyes.

Bertie, face-to-face with death for the first time since the Armistice four years previously, took an instinctive step back. It shamed him, that sudden revulsion at his cousin's mortality. Squaring his jaw, he buried down the disquiet and advanced towards the bed. "Peter, why on earth didn't you tell anyone?"

"And have the harpies decry it as divine judgement on my sinful ways?" The words came out hoarse. "Do stop looming, Bertie, and sit down."

"Aunt Tabitha and… and Mama have more sense." Bertie settled himself onto the large four-poster. In a move he had not made since he was a boy in short trousers, he swung his legs up and leaned back against the bed head. "Has Harvey seen you?"

"Doctor Harvey has been a veritable shadow around these halls. Marcus is driven quite distracted by him. He claims Harvey no sooner appears than he's dashing out yet another prescription to take to the pharmacist. A cure-all to trump all cure-alls."

"I haven't seen your… secretary this morning."

Peter twisted his head to the side. A satirical eyebrow quirked up. "Really, old chap?"

Bertie tightened his lips. Marcus Lamont occupied a place in his cousin's life that sent a quiver of distaste to the pit of his stomach. A former playwright, poet and actor- "such a _flamboyant_ resumé for a personal secretary" as Aunt Tabitha quipped in her acid tones- he favoured a Bohemian hairstyle, town living and refused to touch any form of liquid apart from _creme de cassis_. His position in Pelham house was the bone of contention that had alienated much of the family from their traditional gatherings at the start of the various seasons: social, hunting and grouse. Despite this, Peter appeared to dote on the whimsical fool and refused to reconsider his relationship with the man.

Bertie knew that Marcus was far more than a mere secretary to his boyhood friend. It was that side of Peter's life to which he preferred to turn a blind eye. Instead, he focussed on their shared history and passions: Roman archaeology, on which Peter was the acknowledged expert, and estate management, for which Bertie surprised himself by having a certain flair.

Meeting the wry smile with a stolid stare, Bertie shot down Peter's attempts at levity. "Where is the dratted man gone off to now? The Palladium? The Black Cat club?"

"The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation offices actually." Peter twitched the coverlet, the same way he had when they were boys and climbing over each other's rooms. "Bertie, you're crushing that silk in a dreadful fashion."

"The _where_?"

"The P O offices. Oh, come Bertie, I know you prefer to travel on your own two feet but surely you have-"

"Stop joshing, Peter. What the devil is he doing there?"

"What one habitually does at the P O offices, I imagine. Booking passage on a liner."

Bertie Pelham had been accused of many things in his lifetime. Diffidence, wilful ignorance (his mother's favourite aphorism), being ancient before his time. He had never, however, been accused of stupidity. Looking across at his cousin's ravaged body, fading into death from the dank London fog, he felt the band of tension across his shoulders soften and break. The tight line in moss-green tweed slumped back against the padded headboard. Like Peter, he let his head tip back until he was staring up at the ancient canopy.

"This call-to-arms isn't just a whim, is it, Peter?"

"Like I said, old chap." The sixth Marquess of Hexham's voice was low, the faint drawl he adopted falling by the wayside in his seriousness. Traces of his childhood burr softened the words and made them musical. "It will come sooner rather than later. I would prefer that you were prepared. Not," a gleam of caustic irony broke in. "That you are not eminently more suited to propagating the Hexham line with heirs of your body than I."

"There is always Cousin Oswald."

"You'll forgive me, Bertie, but I prefer _not_ to leave a solicitor whose specialism is bankruptcy cases in charge of my lands and estates. It is you, or the whole bloody lot goes to the Crown."

"There are details." Bertie could see them rising above his head like the grey tide of Longhoughten beach. "Proprieties, precedents. Good God, Peter, duty of care alone will require you to search through the whole bloody family tree in case there should be a heir in closer blood relation than I."

"Marcus has already set the wheels in motion. He may irritate you, Bertie- no, don't protest, I know he does. I am sure you are also aware that he exaggerates his foibles for the sake of your reaction. But he is thorough. There will be no Grantham surprise waiting for you when this mortal frame should cease to function as it should."

Bertie fell silent. Against his shoulder, Peter's weight was slight. He always had been fragile in appearance but that fragility belied a tough endurance that honed generations of Pelhams to survive and thrive in the moors and brushland of Northumbria. Bertie could recall hundreds of occasions, before the war, when Peter had appeared, at the door of the simple Manor House where Bertie had lived with his parents, in small hours after dawn. Stalking cap perched on his thin dark hair, sturdy boots on his feet, the Pelham signet tapping impatiently against his leg. Waiting for Bertie to fall from his bed or to finish stuffing the final square of toast in his mouth.

 _"Come on, old chap. The day won't wait forever, you know. We could be dead tomorrow."_

They walked all over the estate, from the rough, undulating hills around Shillmoor and Barrow Burn to the salt marshes at Alnmouth and Warkworth. Peter searched for ruins, pointing out dips in the land that signified the southern reaches, he claimed, of Hadrian's wall. Bertie kept his eyes peeled for birds and game, the wildlife that populated this barren and beautiful corner of England. In everyday life, Bertie was far below his cousin in station, a junior agent on the lands Peter owned. On their hikes, the roles were reversed: Bertie was the more knowledgeable one, finding sheep tracks and trails that took them deep into the Northumbrian countryside.

It was a shock, one that hit him with the dull thud of a land mine erupting beneath his feet, to realise he would never walk around Hexham with Peter again.

To his horror, Bertie felt his throat swell as though on the breach of tears. Swallowing back fiercely, he folded his arms across his chest.

"Where will you go?"

"Tangiers." The name came out on a low exhale. "Marcus thinks the heat will suit me. And the city is said to be amenable." Peter's hands stopped twitching at the coverlet and lay still. "I should like to live somewhere… amenable for a while."

"I will miss you."

The words were forced out from between his lips. Years of education and training had set a lock upon Bertie's impulses. The opinions of his schoolmasters and his father had been clear: a gentleman did not indulge in sentimentality. Yet even as he ground out the admission, his voice strained by the unaccustomed break, he was ashamed.

How inadequate, how twee he sounded. One would think Peter was going for a brief jaunt to France. Not resigning himself to disappearing into the heat and foreignness of Morocco, to die an exile from his home and heritage.

He should offer to travel with them. No matter that Lamont's simpering set his teeth on edge or that Bertie suffered from hideous sea-sickness even when paddling a raft in the middle of Brancaster's duck pond. It was his duty to see that Peter was properly set up, that a decent doctor was on hand to attend him. God knew what kind of quack would try to wring money from his cousin in that foreign city and Lamont was hardly the type of man to…

"I will miss you too, old chap." Peter had been trained in the same schools, yet compassion rose to the fore more easily in his voice. His hand settled on the sleeve of Bertie's jacket, weighed down only by the heavy bloodstone signet. "Of all our family, you are the only one whom I can say that I will truly miss."

There was a ring of loneliness in his cousin's voice, not unfamiliar. Peter had always been unconventional. When other boys his age would run around in packs, playing cricket and rugby or grouse shooting on the moors, the young Marquess of Hexham preferred solitary hikes, taking some old classics tome with him up to prehistoric tor at the summit of Torr's Combe. Bertie was the only company Peter would tolerate on these trips, a concession that did nothing to lessen his unbecoming eccentricity in the eyes of his relatives.

Peter never joined in the shooting and hunting that was the social bread-and-butter of his set, never showed an interest in the young ladies Aunt Tabitha and Bertie's own mother contrived to dangle under his nose. Even before Peter took up with the theatrical Marcus, he had been written off by the majority of the family as an effete, a gun-shy pacifist and a liability. His war record, spangled with commendations from Allenby to Sir William Marshall- even a caustic side-note in Lawrence's memoirs, published only the previous year- was treated by all but Bertie as an unpleasant and ill-considered surprise.

Bertie cleared his throat. "Mother and Aunt Tabitha will-"

"Be delighted to see the back of me and count down the days until the four strawberry leaves of my coronet rest upon your worthy brow." Peter's smile was faint. "There's a streak of Puritanism in the Pelhams that can be most unpleasant at times. It was my fortune, I suppose, that you, dear Bertie, have such soft spot for misfits."

"Rot."

"Is it?" The noise of the London street, rumbling from the far window, was louder than Peter's voice. "The world isn't kind to those who, for one reason or another, don't fit with its views. And it has devised so many, many ways to hurt us and remind us of our sin for being different. When we find a little sympathy, it can be more precious than any title or any number of acres."

The frail hand squeezed on Bertie's arm, a shadow of the strength that had once lain in the blunt-ended fingers. Bertie turned his head and found the pale blue eyes staring into his own with an intensity that unsettled him.

"Don't forget that, Bertie." Although they were close in age, Peter no more than two or three years his senior, the age gap suddenly felt like decades. Bertie was struck with the unsettling sensation that the man, staring at him with the burning, tired eyes, was not his familiar cousin but someone much older, who had seen much more than could be encompassed in mere years.

"Don't underestimate kindness, especially to those who so rarely receive it. Don't lose your soft spot for misfits and mistakes. If you ever find you do... think of me. Please. Just a thought. Remember our friendship. Remember the comfort it has brought me over the years."

As quickly as it came, the power vanished from Peter's hand. He fell back against pillows, his chest caving in as though exhaustion was a boulder that crushed down on his lungs. His eyes fell closed. They stayed closed so long, Bertie was afraid to pick up his cousin's wrist in case he should no longer feel a pulse.

"Go." Peter's lips barely moved. The order was unmistakeable. "Marcus will be home soon from his errands. You will not want to make small talk with him over tea and crumpets. I shall see that our lawyers deliver the necessary papers."

For a moment, Bertie was tempted to argue. He would stay, remain at Peter's side, follow his cousin to the very edge of the quayside if it should come to it. Let the title and Hexham go hang, for a few months at least. The bloody thing had survived thus far. It would survive a few weeks neglect from its caretakers.

Something at the set of Peter's face, the exhaustion that crashed down on his limp body, held Bertie's tongue. For a moment, he saw the strength Peter had needed to conduct even this brief interview and how much that demand had taken from his diminishing reserves.

With an awkward pat on the shawl-covered shoulder, he manoeuvred his angular frame off the mattress edge. He took his time, as much as he dared. He did not want to jolt Peter any more than necessary. Picking up his homburg from the side table where he deposited it on entering, Bertie shuffled to the door of the master bedroom.

Impulse, the same dreadful foreboding of death that dogged his steps since he saw Peter's state in the harsh morning light, made him pause with his hand resting on the doorknob. Bertie turned back to the bed. Between his fingers, the brim of his homburg crumpled and crushed.

"I will miss you." He blurted out again. "I will."

"Oh, Bertie." The laughter was faint, barely a rattle down Peter's exhausted lungs. It echoed to Bertie's back as he clicked open the bedroom door and let himself into the rich, carpeted hallway of the upper landing. "Oh, my dear chap. _Such_ a soft heart for misfits..."


	2. Misfit --- Epilogue

**MISFIT**

 **epilogue**

* * *

 _The world isn't kind to those who, for one reason or another, don't fit with its views. And it has devised so many, many ways to hurt us and remind us of our sin for being different. When we find a little sympathy, it can be more precious than any title or any number of acres."_

 **\- Peter Pelham, sixth Marquess of Hexham**

* * *

 _Brancaster Castle_

 _March, 1925_

* * *

For as long as Bertie could remember, children had been forbidden from entering the library at Brancaster.

When he was a boy, he resented that stricture enormously. The library, stuffed from floor to ceiling with dusty books and suits of medieval armour, interspersed with glass cases containing all manner of collectibles from Marquesses of Hexham over the years, had been an Aladdin's cave to his wondering eyes.

The very first time he had been permitted to enter- one sticky, school-boy's hand clutched by his mother in a death-grip- he had stared around the leering animals, the strange, primitive weapons and carefully guarded artefacts in fascination. The late Lord Hexham, Peter's unlamented father, had preferred the tribal bonfires of the Far East to the hearths of home. He had travelled far and wide in the world, his Foreign Office postings a convenient vehicle to transport his more illicit acquisitions home to Northumberland without being questioned by Customs.

Peter once quipped that his father arranged for an item to be sent every few months, just to remind his family that he was still inhabiting the mortal plain. Otherwise, the allowance that was shipped to various ports around the world might be cut off entirely. " _For all we know, some enterprising young servant has taken note of my father's rituals and is pocketing the proceeds while Papa rests happily in an unmarked grave on the Hindu Kush."_

Whether the artefacts came from Lord Hexham or his servant, it was never made clear until the final shipment of golden Buddhas arrived, complete with a death certificate signed in Siam Reap, Cambodia. The late marchioness consigned the buddhas to the attic storerooms, had the death certificate framed for her bathroom and swore never to set foot in the dratted library again.

It was she who began the tradition of tea being taken in the ante-library. She had little intention of enjoying her tea and crumpets in the shadows of the artefacts that consumed her husband's attention far more than she ever had.

Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the library had been one of Peter's favourite rooms.

The late marquess of Pelham was not the avid collector his father had been. He contributed one or two glass-cases of pottery shards and late-millennia Roman _denarii._ Apart from that, his interest was limited to the books: reading them, cataloging them. The late lord's strictures on unsupervised visitors in the library became more strictly enforced. Peter would not permit any stray drifter pass between the bookshelves, pulling tomes out willy-nilly. The Brancaster library was his sanctuary, its rigid neatness his solace.

In his own time, Bertie began to appreciate the harsh rulings on entry into the Brancaster library. If he had imagined life as the agent for the Hexham estate was busy, it was small potatoes indeed to the battalion of problems and queries that came his way as the Marquess.

In addition to his title estates in Northumberland and a host of smaller, manorial properties scattered across northern England and the Scottish Borders, Hexham the title laid claim to a number of financial interests in London and overseas. The fifth Marquess, Peter's father, had been as avid an entrepreneur as he had been a collector. As seventh Marquess, Bertie found himself in possession of shares in companies from gold mines in South Africa to railway lines across Nevada and California.

All of this added up to an income that made his nine-hundred pound salary as Brancaster's agent as paltry as the bellboy's tip on a hotel bill. Managing that income, seeing it went to the right people, the right places and that enough was left over to maintain the honour and tradition of Brancaster castle- not to mention covering the raft of new taxes brought in by Stanley Baldwin- took up so much time, Bertie could scarcely walk outside some days. The demands of his solicitor, his man of business and his own agents kept him encaged in his study like a canary bird singing for his supper.

The library, with Howell guarding the door against intruders, was the one area of the house where he could be guaranteed peace. He could stand up from his desk and take a turn around the long corridor without exciting squawks of protest from his employees. He could break away from the endless sheaves of paper and bills and demands to peer into the glass cabinets or pull down one of Peter's books and study the beautiful illustrations.

Bertie, whose one adventure overseas had been a troop train direct to Flanders and the trenches, enjoyed examining the swords and curios preserved in their display cases. He liked to imagine the hot, humid climates from whence they came. Not to touch, of course. That was childish curiosity. It had no place in this _sanctum sanctorum._

Brancaster's library was an adult's world and had passed from adult hands to adult hands, uninteruppted, for three Marquesses in a row.

So when he turned the corner on a bookshelf, one grey day in March, some months after his wedding, Bertie was understandably surprised to come across a miniature human huddled in the corner.

"What are you doing here?"

The words jumped out before he could recover from his shock that he was not alone. Too sharp. Too clipped. A tiny thumb popped into the childishly plump mouth and apprehension made the thin shoulders flinch.

It took a second or two before Bertie realised who his miniature intruder was.

"Marigold."

The flowery name felt awkward in his mouth. He was not accustomed to dealing with little girls. Fighting against his natural inclination to back away from the uncomfortable confrontation, Bertie hitched the knees of his trousers up and crouched down on his floor. It was a clumsy business but then, he was not accustomed to crawling along carpets either. "Hello there. What are you doing here?"

The thumb did not move from its comforting suck. The shoulders no longer flinched though. That was a relief.

She studied him, the grey eyes that looked nothing like Edith. A funny little thing. Always so quiet. No wonder she had slipped into his sanctuary without being seen.

Crouching on his haunches was proving uncomfortable. He was not as young as he had once been. Bertie disentangled his legs and settled back against the bookshelves, mirroring the young child in front of him. A spark of sympathy made him try to smile. "What do you have there, Marigold?"

He reached out for the book. Lord, one of Peter's tomes. Those great slabs, tooled in leather and large with full-page illustrations of Roman life and architecture. It was a wonder the child had the strength to pull it out of the shelves. She did not protest when Bertie turned the pages around to see what fascinated her. She simply curled her knees up closer under the dark green cotton skirt and watched him. As though she was accustomed to being denied the things she wanted.

Bertie had a strange urge to hold out his arm and tuck the little body up under his shoulder. He cleared his throat and flicked the pages over, revealing more illustrations. "Do you like history, Marigold?"

 _Stupid._ He scolded himself, as soon as the words slipped from his mouth. Marigold was not even four years old. He was speaking to her as though she was a casual acquaintance at a garden party. _Do you like history?_ Patronising sod.

How did Edith do it? His fingers stilled as Bertie's thoughts drifted to his new wife. He knew- none better- that not every woman was made to be a doting, affectionate mother. His own Mama dispelled that notion. Yet Edith had a gift for it. Despite her modern ambitions and her extraordinary work with the _Sketch_ , she had a natural affinity for children that filled Bertie with a sense of relief and hope. The Pelhams had spent long enough clinging to lone heirs and single children. A large brood, a sprawling litter of young Pelhams had always been his secret wish. A chance to create the family idyll he never had the opportunity to live.

Edith's obvious affection for her young daughter was evidence enough that his dream was within his greedy grasp. She played with Marigold every day, taking time from her own demanding correspondance to supervise her. She had confided to Bertie that her greatest pleasure was reading to Marigold: " _She seems to_ soak _up the words. I know that so many of them are over her head right at this moment but she listens so well, I can't seem to stop."_

Soon after their honeymoon in Monaco, Edith brought up the subject of Marigold's adoption. Now that their families knew, she argued, it seemed silly not to make everything official. It was nineteen-twenty-five and the world was open for new ideas. The reproductive functions of an earl's daughter were no different than that of any other woman and plenty of women after the war found themselves in a similar situation. War widows, without a wedding ring. If _they_ could live, in privacy and peace, with their children, _why_ not she and Marigold and Bertie?

Her idealism, so out of place in the narrow-minded landscape of their society, made Bertie smile, even as he urged caution. It was not just their happiness that was at stake in Edith's decision but Marigold's as well. Was she to make a principle out of her daughter? How would the girl cope, if not only her close family knew the truth of her origins, but her schoolfriends, their parents, the whole world?

He thought of Peter, ostracised from people he should be able to look to for support and friendship. His cousin had been legitimate, heir to a marquessate. Yet his nature forced him from the bounds of society as much as Marigold's birth would do to her. Remembering the unconscious slights Peter endured, the unrelenting acrimony that dogged every step he took, Bertie made his arguments forcefully

In the end, Edith acquiesced. They had been sitting down to breakfast on the terrace of the _Hôtel du Quatorze,_ overlooking the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. Despite the sunshine, Edith had been pale. Their first real argument as man and wife had hurt her and disturbed the glow of their honeymoon from her face. _He_ had been curt with the waiter, Bertie remembered, snapping orders at the man like an autocrat. He had not enjoyed the argument either.

The man had just poured their morning coffees when Edith broke the tense silence. She reached across the white linen cloth and placed her fingers on top of his hand.

" _You're right."_ Her voice broke a little and his heart broke in turn. Bertie did not dare raise his eyes from the cup of dark coffee to see the pain he could imagine in her warm brown eyes. " _I need to think of Marigold's peace of mind. Her future. That is best if she... if she remains my ward."_

Bertie had felt no pride in his victory. Not even relief, at having the matter settled once and for all. He covered her fingers with his free hand, trapping her in his grip. " _Perhaps someday, when she's older. She will have questions, no doubt and when that time comes..."_

He hoped, even now, back in the blustery, familiar comfort of Brancaster Castle, that day would not come. Looking across the painted pages of Peter's old book at this daughter-not-daughter and her solemn, innocent eyes, Bertie hoped Marigold would do never feel the need to question her parentage or the real identity of her mother.

They had stopped in London on their meandering journey back north from the sunny climes of Southern France. The Pelham family solicitors were good, very good. Quiet, beetle-like men who scurried to and fro in their obsequious black morning suits, filing this suit of guardianship, that afffadavit of parentage.

It was decided that the old story would suit best. The Drewes had returned to Downton, aided by a private injection of cash from the Pelham coffers. Timothy Drewe agreed to pretend that Marigold was his late sister's child, born after a disastrous marriage to a French soldier and raised, for the first year or two, in France with her paternal grandparents.

That would account, Edith informed him, her voice trembling under the strain of remaining unemotional, for the slight French accent that lingered in Marigold's pronunciation, as well as her absence for the first two years of her life. It would also give Marigold a base in Downton, a reason to visit her unknown grandparents, under the guise of paying her respects to her "Aunt" and "Uncle" Drewe.

Bertie's own mother, once they informed her of the plan, had been delighted. It was excellent news, she told them over tea and crumpets at Pelham house, her preferred residence in town. " _The girl is a charming little thing and I am delighted to know her. But it is such a comfort to be certain of her_ place _in things going forward."_

Mirada Pelham smiled at Edith and reached over to pat the new Marchioness's hand with a patronising air that had Bertie biting his tongue on a sharp rebuff. " _You've made the right choice, my dear. The only_ logical _choice."_

It was right, so perfectly logical and right like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle slottting into place. Why so, Bertie thought, did he feel a sting of guilt when he looked down at the little girl, buffeted about by the winds of fate?

The solemn grey eyes studied him for a moment. Then, slowly, she nodded. "The pictures are pretty." A thin hand reached out and hovered over, but did not touch, the page. "Like _Tante_ Edie's storybook."

"Are they?" Bertie turned his head and looked down at the depictions of mosaics from the ancient city of Volubilis. Rough and battered as the illustration rendered them, there was a certain beauty about the hunting scene shown, rendered in the elongated legs of the animals and the symmetrical features of the hunters.

"Yes." The definite note in the childish voice made Bertie want to smile. "But they don't wear trousers like you."

"No, they wouldn't. You see, these pictures here," he tapped his finger against the pencil sketch. "Came from North Africa. A country called Morocco. It's far too hot to wear trousers. And these pictures were made long ago, during the Roman Empire. Only barbarians wore trousers back then. These were civilised people."

"What are barbarians?" The French accent lingered with the long tug of the 'a'. But Bertie was surprised at how easily the difficult word slipped from the young child's lips.

"Rough, savage people who fought against the Roman Empire. Mostly," He tried a wink. "They came from England."

The giggle that stuttered out from Marigold was like finding a pot of gold under the rainbow. The smile she turned up towards his face, unforced and impulsive, was a mirror for Edith. "I come from England! _Tante_ Edie says so."

"Really? Good Lord!" Bertie pretended horror. "Are you a barbarian then?"

"No!"

"Are you sure?"

"No, no!" The squeal was high with delight. Marigold scrambled to her feet with excitement. "Bar-bar- _barbarian_!"

"Careful!" Bertie grabbed a small, flailing arm before Marigold toppled over into a flurry of skirts and flounces. Lord, he never realised how tiny a child's bones were. Marigold's felt as fragile as a bird. He loosened his grip until it was firm but gentle. The Pelham signet didn't leave a mark on her pale skin.

She stilled immediately on his command. As though watching a balloon deflate its air, Bertie could see the childish glee slip away from the young girl. She resettled her feet with an obedience that suggested a familiarity with orders given in just such a tone- or worse. The arm hung limp in his grip. Her lower lip slipped in between her teeth.

Bertie recognised the gesture. It was the same that Edith had worn, that day she confessed Marigold's birth history to him. As though she had tucked in the softer, most vulnerable parts of her face in against recriminations, much as she tried to harden her heart against the harshness the world threw at her.

He did not know much of Marigold's history. Only what Edith had told him. She herself confessed that she had never met the Schroeder family who first adopted Marigold in Switzerland. Rosamund Painswick had organised the adoption and all communications had been filtered through her solicitors. Edith admitted- one night, when they were alone on their honeymoon and the time was ripe for such confessions- she suspected the Lutheran clockmaker and his wife had not been good to the little girl.

A pang of sympathy, at once familiar and different, swept through Bertie's heart.

Reaching up, he smoothed one of the tiny curls back from Marigold's ear. Then extended the gesture to ruffle the fine russet hair into disorder, the way he remembered his own father doing when he was little more than Marigold's age.

The uncertain smile that cracked the blank mask of her face spurred him on.

"Well, sprat." _Where had_ that _come from,_ Bertie wondered. His father had delivered the same, hearty moniker to Bertie as a boy. "Would a barbarian like to see something rather interesting?"

The nod hesitated half way down. Then kept going, a second and third time. Bertie clambered to his feet, as awkward as an ageing Labrador dog. Marigold's arm slipped through his grip, until her hand was engulfed in his, her thumb tucked against the Pelham signet.

"Yes, m-m-my lord." She flicked a glance up at him. "Is that right?"

 _Thank you, Howell._ Bertie fought back a grimace. His butler was more of a stickler for convention than Mirada Pelham herself. No doubt he had taken pains since the family's return to Brancaster to impress upon the four year old her 'place' in the household.

Edith would be furious.

"I suppose it is." He shortened his steps to an amble to accommodate the patter of small feet. "I am the Marquess of Pelham so when I meet people for the first time, they must call me ' _my lord_ '. I'll tell you a secret though," He squeezed her fingers gently, enough to reassure. "I don't like it one bit. Far too stuffy."

"Like Grandma Violet."

"Rather like."

Bertie drew Marigold closer to the smaller glass cabinet. It was one of his favourites in the room. Three rows of Roman coins, mostly from Volubilis or around Tangiers. Peter, following, as he joked, his father's tradition, had sent them over from his retreat to North Africa before he died. Unlike many artefacts by the fifth marquess, Peter's father, every single coin had been removed from the earth by Peter's own hand, not purchased from a dealer.

It gave Bertie pleasure to imagine Peter, as hale as he was before the war, squatting in a sandy, rocky trench under the Moroccan sun. Of course, that was far from the case. Peter himself admitted that he had to be lowered on a litter into the dig. Still, the coins were one of the few reminders for Bertie of the cousin he missed.

Marigold peered through the glass sides of the cabinet. "What's that?"

"Coins. Pounds, shillings and pence for the Romans."

"Are they old?"

"Very." Bertie scratched his memory for the dates Peter had painstakingly inscribed on the letter that accompanied the find. He had been meticulous about the correct labelling for each _denarius_. "That one-" he pointed to a chipped brown smudge, the inscription nearly worn away. "Is two thousand years old."

Marigold studied the smudge in silence. Bertie settled into the quiet, surprised at how easy it was. Even pleasant, having the small hand wriggling in his and looking down at the fine dark hair. She did not take after Edith, little Marigold. It was there in the expressions, the delicate way she had of moving her hands. But her hair, her eyes, even the set of her jaw as she perched beside the glass cabinet and stared in at the curios, was foreign.

How much of her father was in her, he wondered? The mysterious Michael Gregson, of whom he knew nothing more than that he had lived in London, worked at the _Sketch_ and died in Germany? The man who had never known he had fathered a child, who left no other surviving blood relation by which to compare. Only a lunatic wife and... Edith.

"Hold?"

Yanked from his thoughts by the question, Bertie blinked. "You would like to hold it?"

Marigold nodded. "Yes. My lord."

Bertie had a vague inclination that he should demand the word 'please'. A stronger, bone-deep inclination urged him to deny her. Bad enough that the _sanctum sanctorum_ of the Brancaster library was infiltrated by a rogue child. It would go against every tradition in the place if the curios in the glass cabinets were finally picked up and used the way they had been centuries ago. It was not Marigold's... place.

Ah.

Bertie looked down at the small little misfit at his side. Already, through no fault of her own, she had been denied a reputation, a father and a normal life. Britain was changing to a modern society but, Lord knew, the mills of God and social opinions ground slowly. If the truth were known, Marigold could well be a source of curiosity to strangers for the rest of her life. Poor little sprat.

He chewed over the question for a few seconds more. Then, "Why not?"

Breaking the habits of a lifetime, Bertie reached to the concealed drawer of the glass cabinet. From it, he withdrew the small gold key that locked the covering, set it in the cabinet and opened the protective shield. The hinges groaned like a dungeon door being released to the light.

Marigold's eyes widened to saucers.

" _Oh_." She breathed as Bertie lifted out the coin she had spotted- with, he was embarrassed to admit to himself, more than a touch of panache. "It's pretty, my-lord."

The title had distintegrated by now into a sing-song muddle of two words to one, accented now, Bertie thought, with the rolling rrr's of Yorkshire.

He crouched down as he handed it to her. Two thousand years of history fondled between tiny hands like a marble. A miniature thumb rubbed across the barely-there inscription of some long-dead emperor. She stared at it and then looked up to Bertie. The baby teeth gleamed between her lips.

And with that, Bertie Pelham lost his heart for a second time in under a year.

"It's pretty!" She declared again, with more delight than before. "My-lord."

"Yes." Bertie took one small hand from the coin and cradled it in his own. Like Edith, it was swallowed up in the farmer's palm he had. "But, Marigold, maybe you can call me something else."

"What, my-lord?"

"Uncle." He put the British pronunciation on it, not the French as she had done with Edith's name. "Uncle... Pelham."

A ghost from the past reared up behind his eyes, showing a tall thin man, remarkably like Peter, looming over the small boy he had been. _"I am Pelham, young man. You may call me 'uncle'..."_

"Uncle Pel..." She stumbled over the second syllable. Mouthed it, then smiled. "I like Uncle Pel!"

 _Yes,_ Bertie decided, as he exchanged the first coin for a second and began to explain its origins to the smiling four year old. _I rather like it too._

* * *

 **I wrote the first " _Misfit",_ thinking that the relationship between Bertie and his cousin Peter Pelham was one of those unexplored areas of _Downton_ that cry out for a bit of digging... except, once I started, the other side of the _coin_ (ba-dom-dom-dom!) also came to mind: how would Bertie deal with becoming a parent to Marigold?**

 **I hope you enjoyed this Drabble into the potential relationship forming between Bertie and his new step-daughter/kinda/sorta. Please take a look at the other half of the story too!**


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